Gaza continues to concentrate the center of horror, 72,253 Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023, almost the entire population displaced at least once and around 81% of structures damaged according to United Nations assessments. But, in the occupied West Bank, there is another routine of violence, more fragmented and less visible, that returns from village to village, road to road, often with the same script: settlers who descend, Palestinians who try to resist and soldiers who arrive late or appear on the wrong side of the scene.
At three o’clock this Saturday afternoon, in Mukhmas, northeast of Jerusalem, Israeli settlers descended from the Kol Mevaser outpost and attacked Palestinians who had gathered on the outskirts of the village to protect agricultural infrastructure. Youssef Hammas Abu Ali, a poultry farmer in the village, reported that about nine settlers threw stones and threw rocks with a sling. They then cut the barbed wire that the Palestinians had installed to try to prevent further incursions.
Not even two weeks ago, says the same resident, men from the same station had tried to set fire near a chicken coop. The inhabitants called the Israeli army this time. Abu Ali told the Times of Israel that it took the soldiers “more than an hour” to appear. And when they arrived, already after four in the afternoon, the settlers had left that place. Not definitely. They would return twice more.
Rabbi Arik Ascherman, a veteran Israeli human rights activist, told the Times of Israel, summing up what for many people there already sounds like routine: without arrests, and without cutting off access to Kol Mevaser, the attacks will continue.
Mukhmas is not an isolated accident. The United Nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, OCHA, says the occupied West Bank continues to deteriorate, with more casualties, more settler attacks and more forced displacement. In the March 27 report, the agency speaks of more than 150 settler attacks with victims or material damage in around 90 communities since February 28, at an average of more than six attacks per day. Since January 1, 1,697 Palestinians have been displaced by settler violence and access restrictions. And since 2023, there are already more than 5,600, including 38 communities that have become completely depopulated.
Between October 7, 2023 and March 15 this year, 1,071 Palestinians, at least 233 of them children, were killed in the occupied West Bank, according to data cited by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA.
This March left very concrete examples of this routine. On March 17, the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that a 25-year-old national citizen, in the north of the Jordan Valley, was safe and left the West Bank with consular support.
This Saturday, near Tayasir, when journalists filmed the consequences of another attack by settlers and the installation of an illegal outpost. According to the association, there were weapons pointed, orders to stop filming, the violent immobilization of a photojournalist and damage to equipment.
The Israeli army said it would investigate and acknowledged that the soldiers’ actions did not represent what was expected of them.
Understanding this violence also requires understanding its grammar. Zionism, in its broadest historical sense, is the Jewish national movement that advocated the creation and preservation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The current that feeds many of the most radicalized settlers in the West Bank is just a part of this universe and mixes nationalism, religion and territory.
It starts from the conviction that the biblical land — Judea and Samaria, in the language used in Israel — belongs to the Jewish people and should not be handed over to a future Palestinian State. It is from this matrix that many of the outposts come from, as well as the language that accompanies them. After another demolition in Kol Mevaser, a message in a WhatsApp group from activists said: “We will continue to rebuild again and colonize the Land of Israel.” And Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich has presented the expansion of settlements as a way of “burying” the idea of a Palestinian state.
From a historical and legal point of view, the issue is less nebulous than the terrain makes it seem. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was occupied by Israel in the 1967 war and is claimed by Palestinians, along with Gaza, for a future state. More than 700,000 Israeli settlers today live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank among more than three million Palestinians.
Security Council resolution 2334 reaffirmed in 2016 that settlements “have no legal validity”. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal and that Israel must end that presence as quickly as possible. Israel disputes this reading of international law.
On the ground, the border between settler violence and state action often appears blurred. Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization, says that 93.6% of the police investigations it has monitored since 2005 into ideologically motivated crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinians ended without charges and that only 3% led to full or partial convictions.
The same organization documented almost 30 episodes of mass organized violence between 2023 and November 2025, and in 16 of them, soldiers or police were present and directly or indirectly aided the attack.
In a report released this month, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights went further and stated that Israeli authorities played a central role in directing, participating in or permitting this conduct, making it difficult to separate state violence from settler violence.
Reuters also reported in Abu Falah, north of Ramallah, that ambulances had difficulty reaching injured people because of military blockades and that doctors reported attacks by both settlers and the army itself on rescue teams. The Israeli army says it condemns settler violence, investigates it and does not impede the movement of medical teams.
In Mukhmas, however, all this fits into a short chronology. The colonists came down around three. Residents called the army. The soldiers arrived after four. By this time the attackers had already left. Then they came back. In the occupied West Bank, this is often how violence sets in and lasts: not as an exception, but as a method, with an outpost high up on the hillside, a Palestinian village below, and enough time in between for almost everything to happen again.
